[mythtvnz] Use different tuner for adjacent recordings

[Steve Hodge]

On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 9:56 AM, <lists at whitehouse.org.nz> wrote:

> That seems really stupid to me. Quite aside from not being intuitive (can
> you imagine MySky having "hard" and "soft" padding?), I struggle to see the
> benefit.  I don't actually want it to throw a conflict when I've run out of
> tuners and have scheduled "hard padding" (say adjacent recordings on three
> multiplexes),


A lot of people do. Particularly in the US where most programs seem to be
repeated a lot - most people apparently would rather have the scheduler
record another showing than lose the padding (and therefore the start or end
of the show, or at least have to deal with remembering that part of the show
is attached to another program somewhere).

Originally hard padding was the only kind (and I expect it's the only kind
available on MySky). When people complained that they were missing shows
they were advised to manually adjust the padding for those particular
recordings (this is what I still do in the very rare case of a conflict) or
buy another tuner. The scheduler is complex and adding some sort of
intelligent padding was seen as difficult, risky, unwarranted and likely to
result in more user issues when it did something the user wasn't expecting.
I'm not convinced that position was wrong. Soft padding was eventually added
as a half-way measure that is useful to some people and not too invasive
since it doesn't touch the scheduler.

I just want it to use different tuners when they are
> otherwise sitting idle so that I actually get my "soft padding" in the
> recording.


The best solution for you is probably to use hard padding and manually
resolve the conflicts by removing the padding. You've got 8 virtual tuners
so I can't see you having many conflicts.


> Obviously the best solution would be if someone managed to make
> it so that overlap padding (from two adjacent recordings on the same
> channel on the same tuner) was recorded once but linked to both recordings
> (which would solve the disk-use issue mentioned), or encoded once and
> written to disk twice — it's even more important in analogue setups. If
> anybody is keen to work on it, I would be keen to start a donation drive
> and throw a little cash at the problem.
>

It's been discussed before. The problem is not the splitting of the signal
into two recordings, the problem is getting the scheduler to understand. One
solution would be to implement it in the same way as multirec - multiple
virtual tuners that can be used together in certain situations. I suppose it
could also be implemented so that it only applies to soft padding and
therefore doesn't mess with the scheduler. But I think you'll struggle to
find a developer interested enough to tackle this.


> If the "soft padding" worked properly (ranking below an actual program but
> utilising an otherwise-idle card), I wouldn't have thought MythTV would
> need the default hard-padding rules (as the only time you would need them
> would be for specific shows that you knew would likely end late).


It's not that simple. There are lots of corner cases where different people
will want different behaviour (consider the case where someone's tuners
aren't the same quality-wise). This has been discussed to death in the past
- check out the main list archives.


> Setting
> padding in two places is pretty odd, especially when it isn't clear what
> difference it makes.
>

The setup descriptions are pretty clear. It would be better if the options
were all in one place but I'm not sure that's practical given that one
option is global and the other is not.


> In addition, the sensible way to deal with it would seem to be through the
> priority system that is already in there. A checkbox similar to the "try to
> use a different tuner for adjacent recordings on different channels" saying
> "try to use a different tuner for adjacent recordings on the same channel"
> would be a much-preferred solution for people with multi-rec up and
> running. Strangely, it seems that the upshot of all of this is that I can
> get MythTV to do exactly what I want for adjacent recordings on different
> channels, but cannot for adjacent recordings on the same channel.
>

It's worth suggesting. It's probably the most practical way of solving your
particular need.


> From a practical point of view, it sounds as though I will need to remove
> the soft-padding, change the default rules for new recordings and then go
> through and add hard-padding to each of my existing recordings. I accept
> that it will probably work, but it seems a bit of a dirty hack.
>

Actually you used the dirty hack in the first place by using soft padding.
What you now need to do is to set Myth up the way the developers intended it
to be used in the first place. Incidentally your experience is pretty much
why the developers resisted soft padding in the first place.

Cheers,
Steve
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